A SINGLE ELEMENT ON DAY ONE of the new Sportsnet Connected typified the new programming focus of the Rogers Media-owned regional sports network.
It was Wade Belak.
It wasn’t so much the new set with its BAM ("big-ass-monitor", says Connected’s show manager Mike English) 103-inch plasma TV, lack of a traditional sports desk or that the anchors and reporters are more casual in their presentation and attire (some more comfortable than others) that hit hardest. It was Belak, and only figuratively, thank goodness.
The Toronto Maple Leafs enforcer showed up in a long-sleeved camouflage shirt and jeans. Great for bumming around the house, but on TV? No problem, say English and the channel’s programming vice-president David Akande. Belak’s a popular professional athlete that Sportsnet’s viewers in Ontario are likely to know and love because of his head-banging role with the Leafs. But he also represents the demographic the channel is chasing: Aged 25 to 34, male, with a hankering for a little televised conflict.
And sometimes they dress like that. It’s what guys wear, so the fact Belak looked like that on TV was no big deal on Connected, which is now a tie-free zone.
Connected isn’t the only change, however. The channel has suffered some programming losses over the past few months, with the World Cup going to CBC, and both English Premier League soccer and NCAA basketball to The Score. Akande insists the losses don’t phase him a bit as the schedule is already very full. "Ancillary programming," he says.
Sportsnet has also added many hours of ultimate fighting to its schedule of late, an oft-brutal sport whose popularity is only growing, as its pay-per-view numbers attest. The channel will also add news coverage of the sport within Connected.
English and Akande (pictured below) last week sat down with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien to talk about their new show and the tighter demographic focus of Rogers Sportsnet. What follows is an edited transcript of those two interviews.
Greg O’Brien: After day one of the new Sportsnet Connected are you pleased with the way it came off?
Mike English: Exceedingly happy. Launches are a difficult thing because you never know what’s going to happen because you’re dealing with new equipment, with people who haven’t dealt with placement of anchors, new camera shots. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, and fortunately for us it was – I’m not going to say it was flawless – but it was almost error-free.
GOB: Now, with a new show, you’ve rehearsed it and all the rest of it, but even coming out after day one, a lot of producers will pinpoint things that need to be tweaked or changed. Was there anything like that which popped up?
ME: Oh, absolutely. You come back out saying "We could have done this better. We could have done that better." There were camera shots where we had over the shoulder (image) going into the anchor’s shoulder, so the framing was off. I mean there’s the little things that the viewer at home isn’t going to notice, but we certainly notice. And it will be picked apart and improved upon.
GOB: So was Wade Belak a little too casual maybe.
ME: No, he was perfect. The demographic we’re shooting for is 18-34 males, and he was perfect for what we wanted. Having him in here added energy to the show.
GOB: The young males. Is that really new for the show? I mean sports TV is a young man’s game anyway, right?
ME: It is, and the target has always been males. You hope you get females in because it helps sales out from an advertising point of view, but the network as a whole made a conscious decision to shoot after that demographic because they feel it can be exploited and built upon. So we’ve decided to aim our news show that way.
Now the one thing you didn’t see last night but we’ve been doing the last month or so, is pushing ultimate fighting. It’s a huge thing for that demographic. If you look back I think the (ratings) numbers for UFC were higher than it was for major league baseball.
GOB: Spike TV is now an ultimate fighting channel now, I think.
ME: Pretty much. We’re carrying the show as a network too and we’re going to incorporate it in our news coverage. Internally, some people have problems with it, but this is the demographic we’re going after.
GOB: Well, despite what some may think of it, it’s not a fake contest like wresting. It’s two guys actually going at it… a legitimate sport. I mean I know the guys at The Fight Network have a rabid fan base.
ME: Oh, absolutely. And the sport of boxing, if you read the publications in the U.S., is struggling because the UFC is just taking over, and dominating the television networks, dominating the ratings, and boxing is losing its place in the sports culture.
GOB: When will the UFC take a larger position in the news programming?
ME: We’re gradually going to phase it in.
GOB: You’ve got Hockeycentral with hockey experts. Would you have UFC experts?
ME: We’re actually leaning towards doing that.
GOB: Do you see yourselves cutting coverage of other sports with that? Like golf or something?
ME: We’ll cover the major golf events that we have in the past. Typically, we’ll go to The Masters. We’ll go to the PGA. We’ll go to the US Open, and we’ll still do that because guys 18-34 still golf, and they still follow the majors. (But) we don’t have a golf analyst, which we had previously. Every Monday we brought John Gordon in but we just decided not to go that direction.
GOB: Any other changes or things that you’ve dropped that aren’t going to continue with Sportsnet Connected?
ME: I think what we’re doing more is we’re targeting, rather than just a free-for-all, here’s a bunch of stuff, and I hope you like it. We’re going after one specific demographic. As Dave (Akande) likes to say, it’s more about packaging… It’s how you deliver that content and how you wrap it up, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re a slicker package trying to convey the message of fun to the viewer.
GOB: So are ties really outlawed (on the anchors and reporters)?
ME: The only time you’ll see a tie is sometimes on hockey games. Because hockey is still fairly traditional, they’ll wear ties to the game. So a lot of times a Gene Principe out of Edmonton will do a live hit for us from a hockey game and he’ll still be dressed in his suit, and that will be about the only tie you’ll see on the network.
We’ve gone to the casual dress. But if you watched last night, it’s not overly dramatic. We’re not wearing Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts… the idea is what people would wear to the bar we’ll wear on the air.
GOB: And, I don’t know if this is true, but it seemed to me that the hairstyles and the facial hair have gotten a little younger as well.
ME: To be honest, there’s been no conscious decision to do that.
GOB: So no new piercings or anything.
ME: No, no, no, no.
GOB: Those are my questions about Connected. I’ll save the rest of the ones for David.
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Greg O’Brien: Anything that you saw sort of on the first show that has to be changed? Anything like that that jumped out at you?
David Akande: It’s a new gig, and for all of them I was thrilled. For some of them I was shocked. It was as if this was the third month. Sean McCormick acted as if this wasn’t a new show. He was that relaxed.
GOB: He seemed pretty comfortable – like the show was sort of built for him.
DA: Yeah. It’s funny you say that. I’m not saying that it was, but I’m thrilled.
GOB: What was the impetus behind the change and redesigning the show? Was it just specifically due to the demographic you’re going after or did you just want to make yourself as different from the rest as possible?
DA: Both. It sounds cliché, but no one ever asks for the sports news section of the paper; they asked for the sports section. So the word news doesn’t work well. Being a source for information and analysis is important, but having the opportunity to provide the audience with so much more is even better.
We do information and analysis; so does everybody else. But we want to exploit our regional advantage. Wade Belak may not be that important in Edmonton, but I’m a Toronto boy. I don’t care that he’s a fourth line man. It’s Wade Belak. He’s been there for a number of years, he drops the gloves… You can’t show me enough Wade Belak for my Ontario show.
But our advantage, how we win the race, is to exploit our regional advantage, provide opinion, provide pace, and deliver on entertainment. We’re more akin to Mary Hart and Entertainment Tonight than we are to Lloyd Robertson and CTV News.
GOB: So, no concern that Belak was in his army shirt and jeans. Maybe a little too casual?
DA: What is too casual? I mean, guys are guys. Yzerman’s jersey was retired and you can go to other networks and hear about all his stats. You could come to us and hear about what type of guy he was in the dressing room. That’s how guys talk. I know he scored 50 goals in a season, but was he funny? Or did he yell at people? That’s how guys talk. What’s his wife look like? That’s how guys talk.
So we’re going to information analysis, but we want to be entertainment.
GOB: And that’s specifically reflected with the new "In-Box" segment on Connected?
DA: That’s one element. I mean hopefully you’ll see it in a lot of elements. I think you saw it in the BAP – the Big Ass Plasma. I mean guys are tech friendly. Men and their toys. We’ve got the biggest plasma and that resonates with guys. We don’t have a desk – it looks like a bar. That resonates with guys. We dress how guys want to dress in terms of guys going for steaks. That’s how guys dress up to go to a bar, and go to a club.
GOB: But no T-shirts and shorts and flip-flops in the summer or not?
DA: I don’t think there will be any shorts and flip-flops. I don’t want to see (reporter Jim) Lang’s legs. But there might be T-shirts under blazers. That’s how guys dress. The music is the music that guys listen to… and the in-box, to answer your question, is a feature recognizing that guys are web-savvy.
GOB: I also wanted to talk about the network in general, and about the conscious decision to really go after the 18-34 group.
DA: We’re working a little higher than that: 25-34 is the sweet spot… Let me work backwards. We sell on adults 25 to 34. As you know we have two revenue streams. We have cable, which is everybody two plus, and we have advertising. And we sell on adults 25-54, but we gain premiums, and we have premium sales on men 18-49. We’ve narrowed it down programming wise to men 25-34 as the sweet spot.
GOB: Why?
DA: It is what we affectionately call around here the "aspirational" demo. Those younger than 25-34 think life will be: "I’ll have a lot, a jeep, a hottie, a girlfriend, etcetera, and cash." At least that’s how I thought.
And then when you fall out of that demo, which I did some years ago, you think "wasn’t life good when I didn’t have a mortgage, a wonderful wife and kids. I didn’t have as much money, but strangely enough I felt like I had more money." So it is the aspirational demo. And why is that important? It’s because when you fall out of the demo you still want to be treated as if you’re in it.
And what does that mean for the network? That means we change how we do what was previously called news programming. In our programming mix, we take on things like UFC. We take on poker, because poker continues to do quite well on an audience perspective, especially in that sweet spot.
GOB: I can’t stand poker on TV.
DA: The audience numbers are what the audience numbers are.
GOB: Oh I understand. Just my personal preference, that’s all.
DA: It’s about what the people who get to vote with their remote want.
GOB: You’ve had some significant programming losses, I’d say, in terms of NCAA and English Premier League soccer. Will UFC replace that? How do you feel about that programming going somewhere else?
DA: Let me say this respectfully, but you’re talking about ancillary programming. With EPL the final chapter hasn’t been written, so I have to be careful. Am I giving any secrets away? I hope not. But who knows, we could still end up with carriage of EPL because there’s a lot of soccer that they gained the rights to… so who knows how we’ll wind up there.
On NCAA March Madness, you’re talking about a three week period where we took a property that previously came into this market with CBS. But we carried it in such a way that we were getting viewers coming to us versus watching it on CBS.
GOB: Because they could take advantage of your regional channels and see all sorts of different games they wouldn’t normally get to see. I’m talking about myself in that instance because I’m a basketball fan.
DA: (But) it’s an ancillary property. And one can speculate – I have some reason to know this so it’s more than speculating – we weren’t prepared to take on various NCAA properties and they had an opportunity to place a bunch of NCAA properties with The Score, or just March Madness with us… So they made a business decision.
GOB: You had such a successful World Cup in 2006 (in ratings and revenue), and now that’s gone to CBC. Same thing? Ancillary programming?
DA: Ancillary programming. It could mean huge numbers, but we still carry more hockey than anyone else. The aggregate of all our regional games put together is second only to the CBC first game (on Hockey Night in Canada).
GOB: So how does baseball fit into that specific 25-34 demographic?
DA: The numbers for 25-34 in baseball are, (a) first of all, up; (b) in excess of the numbers in other properties. Look at the 25-34 number, and compare it to CFL, compare it to others. Baseball numbers are high.
So, we have a 52-week offering. We’re 26 weeks of hockey where we cover all the home teams… And then we cover Canada’s national (baseball) team for the other 26 weeks with the Jays… and then we’re the home of the World Series.
There’s our 52 weeks. There’s a lot of stuff, but at core in terms of live events that’s what we are.
GOB: What about the Raptors?
DA: Well, we have eight games with them now nationally. We are also the NBA carrier…
GOB: You’ve got quite a number of NBA games, but not that many Raptors’ games. Is that an issue?
DA: The Raptors are, at the end of the day, a regional property. I wish them all the luck in the world, for MLSE is positioning them as a national property, west of Ontario. I won’t speak of it negatively. That’s their challenge. So in our discussion with the MLSE it’s always us saying hey, Raptors are great. Let’s talk about Ontario. They’re talking national, so they position the property where they see that it best fits, and I wish them all the luck in the world.
GOB: Personally, I’d rather watch the (Phoenix) Suns, (Dallas) Mavericks and (San Antonio) Spurs play as often as I can… The Score has always pursued the same demographic you’re going after, while TSN is much more broadly-based, obviously. Do you see yourself in terms of the ratings for your information show overtaking TSN? Is that the goal? Or are you again just looking for a different audience?
DA: Is it the goal? That’s not the focus of our actions. Can I see it happening? Absolutely. Just like do I see the aggregate of our regional hockey numbers beating a national TSN number? It happens now. It’s happened for years. So do I see that happening with our anchor programming? Why not?
Don Taylor and our Sportsnet Pacific offering is number one in that marketplace. Do I want to be number one in the west and Ontario and east? Absolutely. And will that aggregate be greater than the TSN number? I believe it would be.
GOB: I guess the conversion to a high definition Connected will come when you move? (Sportsnet is planning a move to the Rogers Communications headquarters in downtown Toronto but it has not been finalized.)
DA: Most likely, yes. I don’t mean this negatively, but if you flip from wide screen as compared to high def for in-studio programming, for those outside the industry it’s like the Head and Shoulders ad: "Can you see the difference?"
